How to Add Sound to Your Movie Maker Film

What movie is complete without a stirring soundtrack? For example, would the zombies in Return of the Living Dead have been anywhere near as scary without that punk rock playing in the background? Or, how about the signature scary chord you heard every time you saw any body part from the monster in Creature from the Black Lagoon? With Movie Maker, it’s easy to add music to your movie.

If a video clip already contains audio, you don’t have to add anything. However, you can still overlay — or, as videoheads call it, dub — extra music or sound effects, which play along with the audio from the clip.

Movie Maker program accepts audio in MP3 and Microsoft WAV formats. (Just don’t forget those pesky copyrights, and add only what you’re legally allowed to add.)

To add a soundtrack, follow these steps:

Click the Home tab.

Click the Add Music command button and click Add Music on the pop-up menu.

You’ll note that you can also add audio from AudioMicro, the Free Music Archive, and Vimeo — they all appear under the Find New Music Online heading.

Navigate to the desired audio, select it, and then click Open.

After you add music to your movie, it appears as a named strip over the items in the Storyboard. To delete the musical score, just click this strip and press the Delete key.

You can also add your own narration track to your movie — click the Record Narration button on the Home tab. The Record and Stop buttons work just like that old cassette recorder that’s accumulating dust in your closet.